


achilles' heel

by whal



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, F/F, Maybe - Freeform, Mutual Pining, One Shot, bmblb and arkos are side pairings, fluff if you squint enough, whiterose-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25576201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whal/pseuds/whal
Summary: Weiss seeks meaning in her life. A conclusion. A want. A need. She finds Ruby holding out her hand instead.Ruby foresees the future. The deaths and endings of many, but Weiss holds nothing in her hand. There’s no hope. No want. Only a blank canvas painted in black.What is everyday if not lost, where in which both of them haven’t danced at least once?There’s no great enemy. Not now at least. It’s just the both of them fraying.Ruby questions herself as much as Weiss does, one or another, that it’d be nice to be missed by the people who love them back.--Or“Do you think about me?” Weiss asks.Ruby doesn't ponder on the question.“I think about you.” She mutters.“I think about you all the time.”
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos, Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee
Comments: 11
Kudos: 133





	achilles' heel

**Author's Note:**

> this piece is canon divergent; following a non-linear order
> 
> song: low roar - waiting (10 years)

She’s lost. Somewhere and far in between. 

Weiss leaves tomorrow. On the 9 am airship due back to Atlas. 

And here’s the ending to their movie scene. Ruby is tired, cape unclips from the torn rope of her outfit. 

_ Is anyone listening? _ _  
_

Ruby is no genius. But at least she knows the answer. 

(No one replies back.) 

The studio is closing up. The lights are dimming. The act is down and there’s no one else around to witness. 

_ Is anyone listening? _

(There’s static inside her ear piece.)

(No. Nobody's listening in. There’s no one left.)

But she’d like to believe that there’s still someone out there. 

She’d love so. She’d love to think that she’d get more than what she gives, and she’s never given enough. 

When is the point of enough?

Where does she draw the line? Where is the universe’s gaping maw and its conscience playing a part in her life? Where is the help?

There’s no great enemy. Not yet at least. There’s no true purpose when she’s already collapsed onto herself. 

Will people remember her? Or will her dying erase her from history?

Consider it doesn’t matter at this point. But she thinks it’d be nice to be missed by the people who love her back. 

She thinks she’s never been missed before, since she spent her entire life missing things, missing the people that no longer exist. 

That’s an overdue answer to Ozpin’s question. 

* * *

Ruby’s first contact with Weiss' ending was one week before the Vytal Festival. 

It was cold and cool that day. The sun set free in the distance and they were mulling over cups of coffee, and Ruby’s questionable choices in sweets, and the movie downtown. 

“Do you think I can reach to see what it’s like?”

Weiss looked at her. Tilted her head to the side just enough to see that she had blocked the sunset from Ruby’s view. 

“Reach for what?”

“Your hand.”

Weiss flabbergasted at the answer. “What are you hinting at?”

She glanced at Ruby, eyebrows furrowed, as if sensing Ruby’s eyes on her. 

Ruby looked away. 

“I can look at people’s deaths.”

“You’re kidding.”

It was silent for a while. 

“ … No, no.” Ruby held up both of her hands, cheeks adorning a light pink from the sunset, a small smile set at her lips. 

(Shy. Scared.)

“I can see it. Just like how I can see Yang’s. And Uncle Qrow’s. And both dad and mom’s.” 

“How can you be so sure?”

It was wistful. Ruby set her palms onto the window sill, stretching them as far as they could get. 

She looked down at the way they twitched and she brought her hands together. 

“My mom passed away.”

There was no remorse anymore. Or that was the best she could do. 

Weiss touched Ruby’s arm, lightly. Then her cheek. 

“I saw her death. I wasn’t so sure how accurate it was. But I saw her and the blood soaking into the dirt.” 

(She heard rustlings. The sound of Beowolves hurling. The sound of someone in the distance and the blood thirst in the air.)

(Summer’s face fell. There were eyes that hollowed and teeth--her’s--that sunk right into her lower lip. And blood that gripped at her cheek bones.)

(Summer wasn’t shaking from adrenaline. It was fear. Pure fear in her eyes and the way she gripped at herself. The way Ruby woke up later from dreams of the cliff. The way she picked up the cape, tattered and torn right from Summer’s body.) 

Ruby gasped in a breath she didn’t know she was holding. 

She looked at Weiss. 

“I saw--”

She paused. 

“I saw Yang’s.” 

But she didn’t continue. She looked at Weiss again and it was so intense, so powerful the way Weiss’ hand shook lightly holding at Ruby’s cheek. Holding her soul.    
  


“I’m sure it’s accurate.”

Weiss nodded. Tight. A line set at her lips. 

“Then I trust you.”

She held out her hand. And Ruby took it. 

Ruby grabbed onto Weiss’ fingers first. 

Index, thumb, and middle. And she grabbed it firmly and felt how delicate and soft Weiss’ skin was. And she memorized it. 

Then she breathed in a deep breath, and exhaled. 

(And it was just a sound. A bang in the air and Ruby felt the explosion in the distance, the wind that blew at her hair and to her face.)

Ruby retracted herself. She started coiling and Weiss’ looked at her with concern. 

“Are you okay?”

She looked at Weiss. 

“Your death.”

Ruby rubbed at her wrist. Index, thumb, and middle fingers scraping at her skin in circular motions. 

(There were some nice parts. Sure, sure. The part where she didn’t exactly convey to herself. The tiny gasp from herself in the death vision. Weiss’ rapid heartbeat and the blood pounding. Grains of dust hitting the ground.)

(Weiss’ hair was longer, then. The tiara was no more. Crooked, sure, but the weight wasn’t it.)

(There was no awkwardness between them. But she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was, the taste of something else lingered in between her chattering teeth.) 

She would say sorry then. She couldn’t see it. 

But how would she explain the feeling, the feeling of it all?

_ I’m sorry. It’s such a lousy story then. _

“I can’t see it.” 

* * *

The second time was the fall of Beacon. Ruby’s second contact. 

It wasn’t the debris that turned her guts out. She was used to it in some ways, unhappiness, formless, and opaque. 

But this had shores, depths, a purpose and a shape. 

Ruby saw Pyrrha’s death. 

There was hope in it. Hope, because she saw it. 

(She touched Pyrrha’s hand. Callused, bruised, and Pyrrha looked at her with a soft smile.)

(There were eyes that shone brighter than the broken moon parts, and if she could say it back then, it’d be that Jaune was in love with Pyrrha’s hair. Her eyes. Her shoulders and the way she carried herself.)

(But Jaune chased for Weiss instead.)

(Pyrrha’s ending wasn’t pitch black. It wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling.)

(Dread. Hopelessness. There was hope. There was still hope. And hope carried her enough that Ruby felt its warmth through the way Pyrrha grabbed at Jaune’s collar.)

(And Pyrrha kissed him. Kissed him long and hard and she said goodbye softly and she said she was sorry.)

(And she left.)

Here Ruby was, chasing herself onto the top of the tower--the sounds of Jaune’s mauling his heart out of his chest in the back of her head. 

_ “Do you believe in destiny?” _

She did. She does. She still does. 

An arrow strike to her heart. 

_ “I do.” _

(Pyrrha’s warm smile.)

It was lifeless. Cold. 

Pyrrha’s soul. Her stuttering breath. 

Ruby swore she saw Pyrrha’s eyes turned to her. 

It was the clinking sound of her crown-- 

Jaune’s screams still inside her head. 

_ (How could you  _

_ not hear _

_ the size of the planet  _

_ I whispered into your heart) _

Everything sounded so loud then. 

_ (I was so much louder then.)  _

And she lost herself to the light. 

* * *

Yang’s death was different. 

(There was a plunge of encompassing sorrow, and revulsion.)

(It wasn’t pitying sadness. It was much larger. Something about it that mingled at the way how she was still alive. How even on the difficult days, how circumstances were so wretched.)

(Yang clung to it. She searched herself into the things and people that gave her solace.) 

There were so many people that came before her. With arrows and obsidian tools, and wagon wheels. 

Yang always told Ruby if she looked at the night sky enough, she’d see a meadow, green and calm--so calm that she could almost see them. And generations after and after and after that dissolved into the bluegrass and hay. 

She wanted to be terrific. Yang wanted to be terrific. 

Even if for just an hour. 

_ “Get away from her.” _

And she was terrific. 

She was so terrific she felt the electricity in her skin. 

She felt the blood gushing to her veins and she was fighting,  _ fighting, truly fighting.  _

But it was for mere minutes. 

(Ruby felt it. And even she knew she couldn’t stop such death.)

_ “What you want is impossible.” _

(She had to let it be.) 

* * *

Yang laid bare; limp, then. She was no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet. 

It didn’t work, and she had to accept that. All the memories she made before, the love was good. So good to her. 

She loved Blake’s crooked sleep. Sometimes she’d imagine it was her beside Blake on the bed. She’d never dream of fear then. 

Where fear got her was somewhere else. 

_ “Yang, I’m sorry.”  _

How sleepless nights carried her to lull dreams of her imagining that Blake would talk to her again. 

She didn’t want to be happy. She wanted Blake by her side. 

To have Blake by her sadness and her depression.

To have her. Her love. Her care. That much was more precious than happiness.    
  


There were other nights she curled up into herself, sat down onto the shower floor and she looked at the empty space that her arm used to occupy, her flesh, the warmth it carried and the comfort it gave. 

She was nothing, and no one. 

But she wished for Blake then. She’d be--this she knew--she’d be whole and full and everything in Blake’s arms. 

So she held onto herself. 

Broken. 

* * *

The third was in a room full of warm smiles. 

Weiss’ hair was longer, then. The tiara was no more. Crooked, sure. But there was no weight to it. 

How Weiss stood there silently. Beckoning. 

_ Come, come.  _

And Weiss came to her. Looping her arms both on Yang and Ruby’s shoulders. 

_ Come, come. _ __

The taste of something else lingered on her chattering teeth. 

How suddenly Weiss was in the middle of the room. But no, no. She wasn’t just the only person in the room, she was the room.

She became the room.

How it was so loud then. All the noises that occupied the space.

How could she describe the feeling, the feeling of it all?

Ruby could go crazy. 

* * *

Weiss looked at her with uncertainty, later, when the sun was setting. 

She said she could help clean up the unsettling wounds. 

But here she was, afraid to love, or not. 

Bones of her bones, she took the skin off of her rib cage and set it on fire. 

“How are you?” Weiss asked. 

Say if it was back then, at the fall of Beacon, her answer would have been different. 

“I’m okay.” Ruby answered. 

It was for a while; the silence ate at her insides, both churning and wanting to get out. 

If love was real, and true, and everything that was in between, it would be that if Ruby realized Yang and Blake were two heartbroken idiots, enough that they’d want their love to be torn from their rib cages, and to touch each other with their hands and mouths--

Her and Weiss would forget what it was like to be cured then. 

_ I’ll find you. In this lifetime, or the next.  _

She believed in her death back then. She did. At the fall of Beacon, her holding on Weiss’ hand. 

Truth was, she already knew about Pyrrha’s death. Right on the third week of the first semester at Beacon. She never said anything. Not even Yang, or Summer. 

What could she be doing, meddling with the dead? What could have changed?

She could stop the clouds, and listen to them. She could consume the whole world, devour it, chew it to pieces, and then spit it out, spit out the fresh and terrible and beautiful, and alive, alive, in all its parts, alive and singing. 

But she didn’t. 

She let it be. 

“How are you?” Ruby asked. 

Weiss reached for her face. Her cheeks, her jawline. She touched Ruby’s shoulders. 

There were some parts that were more raw than alive. Ruby couldn’t say it, not yet, but if love was real, and true, and everything in between, she’d have answered the question herself. 

“I miss you.” 

“Do you know that?”

Ruby didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I know.”

* * *

This was the part where the grains of dust hit the flooring. 

How Weiss forgot that sometimes she was a dead star, an ex heiress and no more, but here her mouth was covered, a fistful of dust. Grain. 

She leaned into the spotlight, Cinder’s spear hot and searing and conjunturing her insides out. 

Oh how she leaned toward it. 

How she leaned toward what was bigger than her, within her. 

The spell was cracking, but no, no, this wasn’t the part that Ruby told her about. 

There was no blood, none of the part where Ruby told her she was so busy being afraid to love, or not. 

She knew she was missing out on the fun of clothing herself in the embarrassment of life, unbrazen and true. 

It was summer. 

It was spring. 

Weiss was immeasurably, unbearably happy. She was three years old. Four. Five. 

_ “I ran away. Do you know that? I ran away from home.”  _

She was sixty then. She was six. 

(Grief sat with her. It thickened the air, heavy as water, more fit for gills than lungs.)

_ “I ran so far and never looked back.”  _

(Grief sat with her. Grief weighed her down enough in her own flesh that she never questioned why it was there in the first place.)

She was there. 

(She held onto life as if it was a figure, a body, a face. No charming smiles, no silver eyes.) 

_ Oh, what is home, if not the first place you learned to run away from? _

And the spear joined the dust. 

* * *

_ So they told each other, in secret, quiet, mindless, at midnight.  _

Ruby walked outside, the snow turning to slush. 

_ That they wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one. To grow on this earth, two branches of one tree.  _

_ They recognized each other, by the certain way of looking--by the way of shaking hands.  _

She walked with her hand very gently on Weiss’ shoulder, and they talked quietly--whispering.

_ See, she’d know Weiss anywhere. By the shape of her fingers; index, thumb, and middle.  _

And they hopped behind the tractor of Yang’s bike. 

_ She was in the bread, in the cracking fire flickering at night, at the strange rope of the vines from all the different forests Ruby passed by.  _

_ Ruby could  _

_ pick her out of the crowd, by voice alone, by the music of her laugh.  _

_ Ruby could pick her out of the dark, in the silk and smooth nets of rivers and ocean waves. _

Riding off away from the danger they narrowly avoided. 

_ Teeth in Weiss’ heart, with parallels and mirrors, she marked the outline _

_ and called it hers. _

* * *

Jacques escaped. 

The easy part of this was that Weiss could say she did her job, done and done. That the day Jacques got her out of his home was the day Weiss started to fear. 

She wouldn’t know, she wouldn’t know. Parts of her were burning, wanting to get back. 

_ She ran, but to where? _

She could say that she came to the right place, at the wrong time. 

That she met Willow again and promised her that she was here. She felt the things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air, and so Willow

went inside, and she grabbed what was left of the things that Jacques told her before the marriage, before he became so broken, and she tore it up. 

So like the wind in the storm, she caressed Weiss’ cheek, kissed her on the forehead, and told her to leave. 

And Weiss did. 

She left, and Jacques was gone. 

If she’d have turned back, it was toward the direction of the lighthouse. 

_ She wouldn’t know then. She wouldn’t know.  _

(The fourth time wasn’t entirely alive.) 

_ She wouldn’t know what Jacques did. She wouldn’t know that sometimes being a monster was like feeding off of a lighthouse, both a shelter and a warning at once.  _

(She could’ve told Blake then.)

* * *

So the clock ticked--with steady breaths--and the tsk-tsk of the nearby metronome, with pulses of lost touches that never reached its landfall. 

During the train ride for Argus, Ruby bought bracelets, all in different colors, and she placed it into the tiny bag, and checked it out. 

She gave it to each, a ticket of sincerity placed inside such a small placeholder, and they all laughed.

Those bracelets--they made her happy. As ordinary things do. 

Just lately. The fighting, the gripping, the grieving. 

The laughing. It was new. 

Things became a bit easier. She smiled a little brighter. And she thought that maybe--just maybe--she’d be able to pull through. 

So that early afternoon, she pulled Weiss out into the empty open halls of Atlas Academy, and tied the bracelet just a bit tighter. 

She wanted to start the conversation then. She did. But she held herself, held it back and bit it between the seething of her teeth, just to see how real hunger tasted like. 

Instead, she touched the bracelet on Weiss’ wrist with her hands, again, and asked, “Do you like it?” 

And Weiss nodded, and looked at her with concern. 

“Ruby?”

Ruby looked at her. Then she looked away. 

“Sorry.”

Weiss creased her eyebrows. She touched at Ruby's arm. 

“What are you saying sorry for?” 

Ruby touched the world, not as herself but as an echo of who she was. 

Would Weiss hear her? Would Weiss think of her differently?

“I wanted to see your death.” 

Weiss grabbed onto her hand, intertwining it with her fingers, fitting perfectly. 

“You can.”

Weiss looked at her. 

“You don’t have to ask every time.”

“Do you know that?”

Ruby went silent. 

She gnawed at herself. She lost hope some way when she tried to speak, and in the middle her mind burned. 

“No, no. I--”

“I just want to talk to you.”

Her thumb circled Weiss’ hand. 

“I saw glimpses of your death, you know? It wasn’t exactly nothing.”

* * *

(There was an ocean. Wide. Open. Bare.)

(But Ruby heard gunshots in the distance.)

(The smell of dust filled her nostrils.) 

* * *

Weiss and Ruby talked for a long while. Somewhere in between the conversation both sat down on the marbled floor and brushed off their past arguments. 

She asked Ruby what happened in between the time she was away. 

And she asked. 

And she asked some more. 

Weiss sat near her, and the dusk came on like the warmth of Weiss’ fingers against her own. 

“Do you think about me?”

Ruby didn’t ponder on the question. 

“I think about you.” She muttered. 

There was a pause. Silence. 

As if punctuation marks were in the air and she was making a stop to make it sound better. 

Brighter. 

“I think about you all the time.”

* * *

Ruby became a huntress in some way, untethered, always away from home. There was no home to return to. 

She believes that no one wanted her long enough for her to grow her roots. 

So, the curtains are down. The scene is closing, and Weiss leaves tomorrow, for the airship heading back to Atlas at 9. 

She wants to mean something, to someone. To be such an unmistakable way that people have to remember her. 

She wants to be terrific. The sort where she was an immortal, untouchable from head to toe. Even just for an hour. 

But she’s Achilles in this scene, a far away star collapsing into the pit of darkness, a comet colliding an asteroid. 

The songs about her leading victories are wrong. 

When Summer fell, she wept, and she dirtied her face, and 

tore at her hair, and wished for death. This power she has, it isn’t worth it. 

Though when two deaths were to collide with hers, her hands shook. She wished for death then. She did. 

But her death was darkness, eternal and longing. She reached for it, tried for it.

What was she to do, when her heart burned with Summer, at the pyre--the news of her returning never reached its audience? 

What was she to do when her home turned to nothing but golden ashes inside an urn? 

Say, let her come closer, to the danger, to the problem, even if it kills her. 

* * *

Weiss’ death is blank, canvas painted in black. The dark spots glow no golden aura, no smell nor sound. 

Ruby comes to her, then. Her eyes a shining silver, a smile set at her lips. 

“Weiss.” Ruby calls to her. 

She quickens her steps--waits for no response. 

“Stay.” 

“Ruby--”

“Stay.”

Ruby looks at her. Really looks at her. 

“You don’t have to go to Atlas. You don’t have to go back.” 

How vulnerable she would be, Ruby thinks. 

How vulnerable she would be if longing shines through her body. If her skin was translucent lanterns flushed in yellow flames, and leaping in the strange winds that tousled with the curtains from the opened windows.

“You still have me-- and Yang, and Blake--”

“Ruby.” Weiss interrupts her. 

“Jacques can rot in the hell he created.”

“I’m coming back,”

Weiss touches her shoulders, lightly, gently. She circles her palms around Ruby’s skin through the clothing, memorizing. 

“I’m coming back for Whitley.”

“And mother.”

Then Weiss thumbs her cheeks, palms at her jawline. 

“I love you.” Ruby says. 

Weiss looks at her. 

“You know I do.”

Weiss smiles, her thumb circling Ruby’s lower lip. 

“I know.”

Weiss mutters. The tenderness so rare that it felt like a stolen page of a book she reads under the light of the night. Like somewhere deep inside her.

Ruby reaches for Weiss’ hand, for the dark spots again--for Weiss’ death. 

(There’s no pin drops, no sudden smell of dust or gunpowder.) 

(But there’s a forest. Wide and green and she hears the rustles of trees.)

(The leaves cling together, and birds start to chirp.)

(She sees an ocean, and hears the sound of ocean waves. She hears seagulls, she hears Weiss’ voice, she sees Weiss’ smile--)

(And the sound of her own voice.) 

And Weiss kisses her. 

**Author's Note:**

> and I wanna know who you are  
> but it's hard when  
> it's not open  
> and we are lightyears apart  
> and I will handle this  
> cause what I have is
> 
> this view this view this view this view of you  
> \- jt royster - a view (ft. lucy duke)
> 
> the excerpt quoted after Pyrrha's death is from Anis Mojgani, "In the Pockets of Small Gods". work inspired by Ada Limón, Richard Siken, and Clarice Lispector. 
> 
> beta reader: Heulo


End file.
